RapidMiner was just listed as being one of the Top 5 Commercial Open Source Business Intelligence Solutions - yeah!
It is great to see that advanced analytics techniques like data and text mining finally are seen as a fully integrated part of BI and this is exactly the reason why I think that Business Analytics (BA) will become the next big thing. Since its release, RapidAnalytics already got a high acceptance and as the first open source solution for BA will certainly push the limits in the field much further.
In the first video post about the basics of RapidAnalytics I had shown how RapidMiner processes can be executed on RapidAnalytics. This time, I'm going a bit more into the details and show some advanced scheduling features.
In this video you will learn how to
schedule processes for delayed execution,
schedule processes for regular execution,
use RapidMiner or the Web interface to do this,
monitor process execution on the Web and in RapidMiner, and
parametrizing the the executed process when submitting the schedule.
Today we'll start a new video series demonstrating how to use RapidAnalytics for your analytic work. RapidAnalytics is the new data mining server solution that uses RapidMiner both as a data mining engine and as a fron-end to design data mining processes.
In this first video you will learn how to
use the Web interface,
connect RapidMiner to RapidAnalytics,
store data on RapidAnalytics,
execute processes on RapidAnalytics, and
open the results in RapidMiner.
To reproduce what is shown in the video, you need to install RapidMiner 5.1 and RapidAnalytics 1.0, both of which is available from our Web site.
This is only the beginning of the new series. In subsequent posts you will learn how to schedule processes regularly, expose processes as Web services to embed them into other applications, how to generate fancy Web-based dynamic reports based on RapidMiner processes, and more.
We have discussed RapidAnalytics and its benefits here in the blog before , so I just want to give you again the link to a short intro video showing some of its features:
The next big event is called OSBI 2010 which stands for Open Source Business Intelligence Day 2010. Last year, the OSBI was a great success. Together with our partners Ancud IT, Avantgarde Labs, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Talend, and viadee we offered an impressive program for about 100 participants and got a very positive feedback.
This year, the partner line up is almost the same, but we also got our new partners Actuate, who created the BI solution Birt and Jedox with their solution PALO on board. This led to an equally impressive program which can be checked out here:
So, this is the last time I will remember you about this event. Don't say you didn't know about this after you missed it ;-)
Instead, take your chance and get one of the last available tickets for the OSBI 2010 and be there when we, our partners, and our customers and users demonstrate the latest results and possibilities for open source business intelligence applications!
Finally, Rapid-I will release RapidAnalytics to the general public - until now we used RapidAnalytics in pilot customer projects only. We are happy to invite you to the public release of the RapidAnalytics during the second Open Source Business Intelligence Day (OSBI 2010).
Everybody knows business intelligence (BI). In traditional BI, we focus on using a consistent set of metrics to measure past performance and present those measurements to users in order to support them in business planning. Presenting past data of course is only the minimum level necessary for informed decision making and business planning.
There are, however, two drawbacks with traditional BI: the retrospective usage of data alone does not deliver insights about expected outcomes and there is hardly any connection between business intelligence and the underlying business processes. In other words: there is no feedback loop and hence also no real-time integration of analysis results into the business processes themself.
RapidAnalytics is coming to your rescue: it is actually the first open source business analytics solution available. It covers the complete flow from Analytical ETL to Predictive Reporting in a server-based solution built around RapidMiner, the world-leading open source data mining solution. And the process-oriented approach of RapidMiner and RapidAnalytics allows the direct and even real-time integration into business processes.
The following video demonstrates some of the features of RapidAnalytics. It offers features like remote execution, scheduled processes, quick web service definitions, and a complete web-based report designer:
A visit of the OSBI 2010 is recommended for all interested users who want to get a hands-on demonstration of RapidAnalytics. But there is much more: many interesting talks and workshops of our partners Actuate, Ancud, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Jedox, Talend, and Viadee will cover all relevant aspects of open source business intelligence.
More information and the online registration form for the OSBI 2010 can be found at
The world cup 2010 was a great event - although sometimes quite unexpected things had happen. For example, the results of France were certainly worse than most people had expected.
As many of you might know, we have set up a service called "Mannschaft der Herzen" ("Team of Hearts") which monitored the sentiment in news texts, blog or forum posts and aggregated the results. We connected RapidAnalytics, the server behind RapidMiner, to more than 1000 online channels and analyzed thousands of texts per minute. One of the most surprising results: We predicted Spain as the winner of the World Cup even before the event had even started.
Look at the following screenshot - it was taken on June 4th, one week before the tournament had started:
The bars show the amount of positive document segments compared to the amount of negative or neutral texts. The higher this ratio the higher we considered the winning chance ("Siegchance") of the team. Spain is the green bar on the right and you can see that the positive sentiment ratio is clearly highest for them.
It was also really interesting to monitor the change in sentiment over time. During the World Cup, the positive comments about the German team got more and more. Finally, Germany even had the highest winning chance but was again replaced by Spain during the finals.
But also the extracted topics turned out to be quite useful. It was easy to detect the fact that the English captain Ferdinand was injured which had a great impact on the sentiment analysis. The following screenshots show the sentiment change over time and the extracted topics as tag cloud displaying the sentiment of the topic by color and the importance by tag size:
The analysis was performed for German texts but it is of course also possible in any other language that is supported by RapidMiner (which is basically any language but sums up to about 30 if you need linguistic approaches).
Usually, we perform Sentiment Analysis for our customers to monitor their brands or products or their competitors. But it was really fun to analyze soccer texts for a change.
Hope you liked it. The web site showing also the cool and interactive flash charts of RapidAnalytics is still available on
